The next morning, I woke to banging on the door. Romi had had a sense that something was wrong and had tried to call, but I hadn’t picked up all night. Still woozy, I started to cry again. Seeing the state I was in, she went into high gear, boiling tea, laying me out on the couch, and cleaning up my face. She held my hand, her other palm resting on her own throat, as if my pain were her pain, and she felt everything and understood everything.

Two months later I quit the company. I enrolled in graduate school at NYU, but stayed on in Tel Aviv through the summer, and flew back only days before the start of the semester. Romi had met Amir by then, an entrepreneur fifteen years older than her, with so much money that he spent most of his time looking for ways to give it away. He wooed Romi with the same singular drive he applied to everything he wanted. A few days before my flight, Romi threw a goodbye party for me at our favorite restaurant, and all the dancers came, and our friends, and most of the boys we’d slept with that year. Amir didn’t come because he was busy, and the following day Romi left for Sardinia on his yacht. I packed up my things alone. I was sad to leave and wondered if I’d made a mistake.

For a while, we stayed in close touch. Romi got married, moved to Amir’s mansion on a cliff above the Mediterranean, and got pregnant. I studied toward my degree and fell in love, and then out of it a couple of years later. In the meantime, Romi had two children, and sometimes she sent me photos of those boys, whose faces were hers and seemed to borrow nothing from their father. But we were in touch less and less, and then whole years passed in which we didn’t speak at all. One day, soon after my daughter was born, I was passing a cinema on Twelfth Street and I felt someone’s gaze, and when I turned I saw Ershadi’s eyes staring out at me from the poster for Taste of Cherry. I felt a shiver up my spine. The screening had already passed, but no one had taken down the poster. I took a photo of it, and that night I sent it to Romi, reminding her of a plan we’d once hatched to go to Tehran—me with a fresh American passport without Israeli stamps, and her with the British one she had through her father—to sit in the cafés and walk the streets that were the setting of so many films we loved, to taste life there, and lie on the beaches of the Caspian Sea. We were going to find Ershadi, who we imagined would invite us into the sleek apartment he had designed himself and listen while we told him our stories, and then tell us his own while we drank black tea with a view of the snow-capped Elburz Mountains. In the letter, I admitted to her the reason I’d cried the night she told me about her encounter with Ershadi. Sooner or later, I wrote, I would’ve had to admit that in the blaze of my ambition, I’d failed to check myself. I would have had to face how miserable I was, and how confused my feelings about dancing had become. But the desire to seize something from Ershadi, to feel that reality expanded for me as it had for her, that the other world came through to touch me, had hastened my revelations.